


Conversations

by alternatedoom



Series: Wade, Kayla, and Victor [2]
Category: Wolverine (Movies)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Missing Scene, Wolverine: Origins Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-13
Updated: 2009-07-13
Packaged: 2019-01-20 23:52:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12444729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alternatedoom/pseuds/alternatedoom
Summary: The aftermath for Kayla.





	Conversations

Kayla wakes up in the passenger seat of a car. She doesn't have to look over to know who's behind the wheel.

"Look at you, didn't even get buried," Victor says, observing her. "Told you so."

Kayla shifts, and sits up carefully. She's sweaty from sleeping in the warm car, but still wearing all her clothes. It's comforting to know Victor didn't ... do anything to her while she was unconscious. She realizes she was half expecting to wake up naked. Of course, even with all her clothes on, she's not exactly comfortable. Most of the fabric she's wearing is stiff with one fluid or another.

She feels violated, tired, and sad...but more than anything else, she's thirsty. Maniacally thirsty.

She thinks about not talking to him, but that could just cause further problems. Victor's not the first man she's slept with that she didn't love, and he's not the first man Stryker has required her to screw. Better to treat the whole thing like just another mildly fucked up professional experience, no matter how sick the whole thing makes her feel inside.

"Good call," she says finally. She's hoarse, and her voice is scratchy.

Victor glances over at her. "Yes and no. I knew my brother wouldn't bury you. I was actually thinking a wild animal might smell the blood and take a few bites."

She's stunned for a moment by the mental picture, and then feels glad she didn't think of that beforehand.

Victor drives with only one hand on the wheel. "How do you feel?"

"I'm thirsty," she admits.

Victor reaches towards her and she jumps slightly, but his arm keeps going as he stretches behind her seat, groping for something on the passenger side backseat floor.

Reaching, his face is a few inches closer to her, and he gives her an annoyed look. When he pulls his arm back, he tosses two bottles of water into her lap. She fumbles and drops one on the floor of the car.

They make a brief stop at a motel. "Stay here," Victor says before he gets out of the car.

Kayla stays.

* * *

When Victor knocks on the motel room door, Stryker answers at once, ushering him inside. Zero's sitting on the bed, twirling a gun in his fingers.

"Did he buy it?"

"Oh, he bought it."

"And you defeated him?" Stryker's excited, Victor can smell it coming off him in waves.

"I'm here, aren't I?"

Stryker lowers his voice an octave. "Did Kayla cooperate?"

"Yes."

"Were you gentle with her?" Stryker says. There's a note of sternness in his voice that Victor does not take at all seriously.

"I was nice, like you said," Victor answers, amused.

"Well, I bow to your judgement, Victor," Stryker says stiffly. He often evinces squeamishness about Victor forcing himself on people, but he's pleased with the results of the mission and doesn't hide it. "Good work. So far, so good."

Victor nods slightly. Victor thinks Stryker enjoys being scandalized by his exploits, and that his squeamishness is largely pretended. Victor neither diminishes nor exaggerates his ventures. He and Stryker have a long familiarity, and while he has a certain distant respect for the man, he doesn't care much what the colonel thinks.

His work is done. Five minutes later he's en route to the chopper that will return them to the base, Kayla silent beside him in the passenger seat.

* * *

Wade comes to Kayla's room to brief her. Normally it would be Stryker himself or Zero, since Wade takes almost nothing completely seriously, but Stryker's gone and he took Zero with him.

It's sad, but outside of Emma, Wade's her only friend in the compound. Zero's polite to her, but like Stryker he's careful to keep about ten feet between them at all times. Besides Victor, whom she's always made an effort to avoid, Wade's the only person crazy enough to get in close proximity to her. She doesn't harbor any illusions about being special, though. Wade's friends with everybody he doesn't completely irritate.

"It's Wade!" he calls from the hall. Kayla doesn't love the idea of visitors. She crashed as soon as she came upstairs, and she slept through dinner. She's recently awakened, she's dirty, her face and hair are oily. She feels lousy.

When she reluctantly opens the door, he's holding a plate of food. "I brought you dinner," Wade says brightly. As always, he's wearing his swords on his back. She's never ever seen him without them.

Kayla accepts the food with a half-hearted smile. Wade's careful not to let their fingers touch as she takes the plate, but it doesn't bother her. Wade's nuts, but he's too smart a soldier to ask for trouble, and she respects that.

"May I come in?" Wade says politely, then walks past her without waiting for an answer.

He sits on the bed, spreads his legs and leans forward slightly, not quite resting his elbows on his knees. "Stryker told me to come and brief you, but didn't give me a file so I don't really know all the details. You know I have a lot of respect for the man, but I don't know how he expects me to learn to brief or debrief people properly when he never lets me do it, and then when he does let me do it he doesn't give me a dossier to work from."

Kayla puts the plate down and sits in her desk chair. She lets his chatter wash over her, and she looks at the food. There's a couple pieces of chicken, a roll with two foil-wrapped pats of butter, steamed broccoli and a small apple. She reaches down for her bottle of water. When she got back to her room, she found someone had left a case of bottled water on the floor by her bed.

Payment for a job well done, she thinks dully.

"...I know it'll be hard, but I'm going to have to ask you to keep your hands off me during this meeting. Not that I don't trust you, just that like the rest of us I have to do as I'm told, and I was explicitly told not to let you touch me."

"You never touch me anyway," Kayla says. The comment's meant to come off as flippant, but she sounds sad to her own ears. She takes another sip of water, with fleeting thoughts of Logan, and sets the bottle down.

"Well, I don't know you that well and I don't want to come off as handsy, unless of course that was an invitation." Wade looks at her. "Are you all right?"

"Fine. Tired." Kayla looks at her hands in her lap. "Recently drugged."

"Yeah, I heard about that," Wade says. "Probably would have read about it too if Stryker had given me the file," he says sadly. He leans back, sitting up straight. "You should eat that before it gets cold."

She isn't hungry. In fact, she's queasy. But she knows she should put something in her stomach. She hasn't eaten since breakfast, and it's late in the day now. She picks up the roll and starts buttering it.

"I don't have a lot to tell you, anyway. Mostly just that we have to stay out of the lower levels for the next week," Wade says. "Upon pain of death, Stryker says, because we could ruin everything, blah blah blah. Victor too."

She shifts uncomfortably.

"Otherwise, we'd be in one of the actual debriefing rooms, to do this right, instead of me sitting on your bed. With no dossier." Wade pets the fabric of the down comforter with one hand. "Nice comforter, by the way. I like the texture."

Kayla wonders how much Wade actually knows about what Victor did to her in the forest.

"Someone will bring us meals three times a day. We're as much prisoners as the kids in the basement. This is going to be hell," Wade says with a roll of his eyes. "If you want something else, a snack or whatever, you can dial downstairs for it."

"I'm always as much a prisoner as the kids in the basement," Kayla says, more bitterly than she intended.

"Oh, right. Well, only in spirit. Now you can't even walk around."

Kayla deliberates only a moment before asking what she truly wants to know. Wade's always seemed to appreciate being asked questions, and she genuinely wants to know the answer to this one.

"Do you know what's going to happen to Logan?"

"Yeah, Stryker's going to put a metal exo-skeleton or something on his bones." Wade examines his fingernails. "Make him more badass. Cause bone claws and crazy-fast healing clearly aren't badass enough."

Kayla thinks about that.

"Well, I should go. I have a previously scheduled engagement to bother Victor," Wade says.

"Thank you for the food," she tells him as he moves to the door.

He pats her on the back - a first. "Hang in there, camper," he says, and when their eyes meet she knows that he knows.

Her lips feel dry. "I thought you weren't supposed to touch me," Kayla says, smiling slightly despite herself. Wade's a little outside the box, but in small doses his craziness is strangely endearing. He'd probably kill her even faster than Victor if Stryker told him to, but she knows Zero and all of the military personnel here would do the same. Wade likes anyone who'll listen to him, and she thinks of him as a friend, but she knows in her heart she has no true friends here. As she got to know Logan, she understood why he didn't fit in with this crowd long before he explained to her.

Wade looks at her with his sharp, beady eyes that miss nothing. "On the contrary, I was told not to let you to touch me," Wade tells her seriously. "Stryker didn't say anything about my not touching you."

You and Victor both, Kayla thinks.

"Following my instructions to the letter, here," he finishes. "Remember, lower levels are off-limits. Until further notice."

She nods. "Bye, Wade."

"Later," Wade says with a wink, and for a moment she watches him head down the corridor.


End file.
